This year, Danger Season was made acutely dangerous in new and entirely unnecessary ways by the Trump Administration and its Congressional supporters. While 2025 data clearly showed the continuing trend that climate change is making extreme weather more frequent and extreme, the fact that it was an exceptionally bad year for these extremes may have gone unnoticed. That’s because some of the most devastating weather events struck just outside our borders, allowing the administration to dodge consequences and accountability for its reckless cuts to our forecasting and disaster response agencies.
As we have been doing since 2023, UCS tracked alerts issued by the US National Weather Service (NWS) for heat, floods, storms, and fire weather conditions during Danger Season—the period between May and October when climate change increases the frequency and magnitude of these extreme events. This year was marked by three category 5 hurricanes, deadly flash flooding, record humidity in June and July, and heat records set in the US and around the world. And notably, by the end of October, everyone in the US and its Caribbean territories had experienced at least one extreme weather alert.
Let’s review what happened this year, the connection that these events have to climate change, and how the Trump administration’s devastating attacks are exacerbating impacts of these events on people across the country.
Record heat, deadly flash floods, major hurricanes
The 2025 Danger Season really ramped up with a brutal June heat wave over the Midwest and Northeast. From June 22 to June 26, over 70 million people experienced their muggiest June on record. Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, and Vermont each broke their all-time June temperature records.
July was no less brutal. From the 21st to the 25th, a heat dome made three times more likely due to climate change hovered over the Central Plains, Midwest, and Northeast where the heat index in some cities reached or exceeded 110ºF.
Unquestionably, the most heart-breaking extreme weather disaster this year was the Texas Hill Country flooding on the 4th of July, where more than 100, including many little girls attending summer camp, lost their lives. Catastrophic flooding also affected western Maryland. In a petty display of partisanship and playing politics with people’s lives, the president denied requests for federal aid filed by Maryland and other states with Democratic governors but approved aid for red states.
We can count ourselves lucky that no hurricanes made landfall in the US or its territories, because the 2025 hurricane season was remarkable. With a couple of weeks still left in the season, so far 13 storms have formed, five of which became hurricanes, with four becoming major hurricanes.
Perhaps this is the most impressive statistic from this year: 2025 joins 2005 as only the second hurricane season in recorded history to have had more than two Category 5 hurricanes. The most destructive hurricane this year was Hurricane Melissa, one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean. Melissa was a late-breaking monstrosity that took about 30 lives in Haiti and the Dominican Republic and nearly 60 in Jamaica. Melissa tied with the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 as the most intense hurricane at landfall in the Atlantic Basin. The fingerprint of climate change was everywhere with Hurricane Melissa; I will discuss more below.
During late July in Ruidoso, New Mexico and Montecito, California, heavy rain fell on burn scars from previous wildfires, causing debris flows and disastrous flooding. Burn scars can form following wildfires when the heat of the fire essentially bakes the soil, creating a brick-like layer that makes it hard for water to penetrate. When it rains on burn scar areas during monsoon season, flash flooding and debris flows occur because the ground isn’t absorbing the water.
Though US wildfires this summer were not catastrophic, historically large wildfires (and the second-worst on record behind 2023) in Canada caused poor air quality across the US Midwest and Northeast. This year, UCS added air quality index (AQI) indicative of air pollution from small particulates due to increased frequency of bad air from wildfire soot and smoke to our Danger Season alerts tracker.
Climate change fingerprints all over these extreme weather events
This year’s brutal heat drove home the unrelenting fact that heatwaves are becoming more frequent and lasting longer in the US Climate change has clear fingerprints on this and other extreme weather events tracked during the 2025 Danger Season.
The Texas Hill Country tragedy occurred in the context of broader flooding this year in Central Texas brought by climate change-influenced weather whiplash, a term for an abrupt transition in environmental conditions, in this case from drought to flooding.
And this year we saw four episodes of historically rare hurricane rapid intensification (an increase of about 35 mph in sustained wind speeds of a storm in 24-hour period) for Hurricanes Erin, Humberto, Gabrielle, and Melissa. Erin underwent rapid intensification on August 16, creating surf, storm surge, and wind risks to the US East Coast. In September, Humberto did as well.
Hurricane Melissa, toward the end of the 2025 Danger Season, was another example of a monstrous hurricane fueled by fossil fuel-caused climate change. Warm ocean water is hurricane fuel, and warmer-than-average waters under Melissa were made 500-700 times more likely to occur due to climate change. Melissa moved over these waters at an unusually slow pace, which enabled the storm to gain incredible strength. There’s evidence that climate change could cause future storms to slow down, as well, which could raise the risk of major strengthening.
Trump’s attacks on vital public safeguards
This year, the nation’s ability to prepare for, cope with, and recover from extreme weather was badly diminished by the Trump administration’s devastating budget cuts and widespread destruction of federal agencies.
The administration compounded the damage with disinformation spread by its incompetent leadership who slashed the federal scientific workforce and resources needed to respond to extreme events. Reducing or cancelling weather forecasting balloons launches, getting rid of experienced meteorologists, gutting NASA and NOAA’s ability to predict extreme weather events are just some of the ways the Trump government has put us at greater risk making hurricane season more dangerous, and reducing our ability to respond to wildfires.
The most galling of the Trump administration’s moves to weaken the federal disaster response and recovery workforce and resources as evidenced by the the intentional step-by-step effort to dismantle FEMA, including downsizing FEMA staff, the cancellation of grant programs, new bureaucratic barriers, and unqualified FEMA leadership, to name a few.
As if this weren’t enough, in an unprecedented move, the Trump administration established a policy that pushes the disaster response and recovery burden to the states, which means the costliest disasters could significantly deplete states’ reserves. The attacks on FEMA and federal disaster response and recovery were so insidious that FEMA staff resisted by establishing the Alt-FEMA newsletter, drafting the Katrina Declaration and Petition to Congress, and holding a FEMA staff rally in front of FEMA headquarters.
The tragic Texas Hill Country floods sadly brought home how the destructive Trump policies impact people in the real world. Remarkably, a defunded and understaffed National Weather Service (NWS) was still able to issue timely alerts, but the response was hampered by lack of urgent action by local emergency managers, leading to tragic results.
The NWS’ timely actions highlighted the need to keep this vital service well-resourced. We also saw how the FEMA response was dysfunctional, delinquent and irresponsible, with delayed and few staff on the ground, an unreachable acting FEMA administrator, non-functioning call centers due to contracts not being renewed, and general bottlenecks given that grants over $100,000 needed the Department of Homeland Security Secretary’s signature.
This year, we were lucky. Next year we may not be. Let’s be ready
Weather-wise, this Danger Season could have been much worse for the US (although the Atlantic hurricane season officially ends November 30). Next year, we may not be so lucky. During blue skies, this is the time to pressure policymakers to do everything they can to reverse some of these terrible Trump administration policies and restore the federal taxpayer funded systems that help keep us safe.
Erika Spanger, Marc Alessi and Shana Udvardy contributed to this report.